up new land, potentially displac ing vulnerable communities whose rights are poorly protected. The Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has warned that 60 million indigenous people (worldwide) may be driven off their lands to make way for biofuels.
Labor Exploitation
Workers at the sugar cane fields of Alagoas. Source: Cícero R. C. Omena
“The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.” Lester Brown
Biofuel Poverty Poor populations simply do not have the economic flexibility to deal with food price fluctuations. There is general consensus amongst biofuel advocates that developing countries, particularly Brazil, will benefit from the expansion of the biofuel industry through job gener ation, foreign investment, regional development in depressed areas, new tax and foreign exchange rev enues, and the sale of technology. In the 1970s, when Pernambuco State in north-east Brazil was the largest national producer of sug arcane, poverty levels were among the highest in the world. Current
10 | Biofuels
practices continue to pose serious threats for the poor rural population. One of Brazil’s most stringent prob lems is the issue of land tenure: 1% of the country’s landowners control nearly half of all Brazil’s agricultural land. In the 1970s and 1980s, land tenure conflicts were particularly acute with the expulsion of small farmers from their land by largescale ethanol producers. There are laws to protect small-scale farmers from displacement, but they are often weakly enforced. The problem persists today and lies within the responsibility of large agribusiness expansion. Companies or rich and powerful investors buy
Apart from the high input of water and pesticides, sugarcane produc tion also requires intensive labor. The expansion of the sugarcane crops in Brazil provides the rural poor with direct and indirect employment. Towards the end of the 1980s, the ethanol industry was the third largest job creator in Brazil, with approximately 800,000 workers. The sugarcane industry ranks as the second best paid agri cultural sector after soybean farm ing. The workforce breakdown of the Brazilian biofuel agribusiness is 30% skilled positions, 10% semiskilled and 60% unskilled. One of the problems associated with sugarcane production is the seasonality of the process, under mining the possibility for permanent employment as they are only hired during harvest periods, which last for six to seven months per year. Sugarcane production also involves a large amount of migrant workers. In the sugarcane plantations in São Paulo, some 200,000 workers come from different regions of the country, mostly the north-east and from Minas Gerais.